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‘A failure of imagination’

I noticed today that the MacZotAppADay organisers finally cottoned on that people are mirroring the freebie downloads they’re putting up each day this month – quelle surprise!

It has came to the attention of the MacAppADay team that some site visitors are currently ‘mirroring’ applications. The ramifications of mirroring are worse than you might at first assume:

To protect the rights of our participating developers, we are unable to provide early alerts to bloggers. This is because the early alerts would include a download link, that a blogger could then ‘mirror’

Time taken to send out Digital Millenium Copyright Act notices has meant our team have been unable to fix problems for our users on NTL, and other ISPs with shared IP addresses, as clerical work has been taking up all our time

This also means we’ve been unable to respond to emails

It has also dramatically reduced exposure for our advertising partners, who keep this site going

Man sending out 10 identical cease and desist e-mails is real hard work! (OK 10 is a guess but there can’t be that many). The real eye opener is the bottom one – remember someone is getting paid here and it sure isn’t the developers.

What you think because you gave away your app away for free for a day that people will suddenly pay for it tomorrow? No, tomorrow people will share it with their friends, stick it on Limewire and torrent sites and they’ll continue to enjoy its ‘freeness’. You gave it away free in the first place, it’s hardly a difficult moral decision to give a copy to someone else now is it?

They’re now threatening people with the good old DMCA. Seriously, did no one see this coming? But what’s more aggravating is that one of the site sponsors/someone involved in the running of the site, also runs the Mac-Headz.com forum which offers facilities for people to trade licenses/serials for apps they’ve bought on MacZot. That sounds an awful lot like I’ll show you my serial if you’ll show me yours. I can imagine more than a few developers might not be thrilled that people are swapping licenses for apps they’ve probably already sold at a loss.